Marxism is a disease of prosperity and elitism

Published: Saturday, April 27, 2013 at 08:00 AM.

By MICHAEL SMITH

PANAMA CITY BEACH Let’s have a look at the “great” Marxists and contemporary radicals:

● Karl Marx: Born into a wealthy Jewish family. He spent his early college years drinking, gambling and running up debts. His father yanked him out of the University of Bonn and sent him to Berlin after he participated in a duel. Died penniless and stateless; nine people attended his funeral. He was an atheist.

● Friedrich Engels: The eldest son of a wealthy German cotton importer/industrialist, after he died he left an estate worth $4.8 million to Marx’s daughters. Raised a Christian, became an atheist.

● Vladimir Lenin: Born to a wealthy middle-class family. Baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, renounced God at 16.

● Josef Stalin: Son of a cobbler and a housemaid. Father was abusive and beat him and his mother. Educated at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Became an atheist.

● Leon Trotsky: Born the fifth child of eight of well-to-do Jewish farmers. Lost battle for control of the Russian communist movement to Lenin and Stalin. Stalin had him assassinated during his exile to Mexico. Atheist.

PANAMA CITY BEACH
Let’s have a look at the “great” Marxists and contemporary radicals:

● Karl Marx: Born into a wealthy Jewish family. He spent his early college years drinking, gambling and running up debts. His father yanked him out of the University of Bonn and sent him to Berlin after he participated in a duel. Died penniless and stateless; nine people attended his funeral. He was an atheist.

● Friedrich Engels: The eldest son of a wealthy German cotton importer/industrialist, after he died he left an estate worth $4.8 million to Marx’s daughters. Raised a Christian, became an atheist.

● Vladimir Lenin: Born to a wealthy middle-class family. Baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, renounced God at 16.

● Josef Stalin: Son of a cobbler and a housemaid. Father was abusive and beat him and his mother. Educated at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Became an atheist.

● Leon Trotsky: Born the fifth child of eight of well-to-do Jewish farmers. Lost battle for control of the Russian communist movement to Lenin and Stalin. Stalin had him assassinated during his exile to Mexico. Atheist.

● Mao: Son of a wealthy farmer. Father grew wealthy via capitalism but was a strict disciplinarian and beat Mao and his siblings. Raised Buddhist, became an atheist.

● Pol Pot: Born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Cambodia. While attending Catholic school, he lived with his cousin, a member of the Royal Ballet and mother of the crown prince. Pot grew up in the royal palace. He traveled to Paris for university. He also became an atheist.

● Bill Ayers: Born into a wealthy family, attended private schools. Ayers is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

● Bernadine Dohrn: Born into an upper-middle-class family, Dohrn graduated from Whitefish Bay High School where she was a cheerleader, a member of the National Honor Society and editor of the school newspaper. She is now clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern Law School.

● Kathy Boudin: Born into a well-to-do family with a long left-wing history. Her last year at Bryn Mawr was spent studying in the employ of the Soviet government to teach on a collective farm. After 22 years in federal prison for her role in a bombing that killed two police officers and an armored car guard, she taught at Columbia and was recently honored by the New York University Law School program as its Rose Scheinberg Scholar in Residence.

Lenin exemplified another trait of all of these leftist thugs — the rejection of moral absolutism. Perhaps that is why they rejected God, because to do the things they did and believe what they did they had to reject the idea that there is an absolute standard of good and evil. The entire ideology of Marxism, including its four supporting pillars of socialism, the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism and class struggle, is all built on a relativistic lie.
Most had religious, wealthy families, or at least had access to privilege. Most found radicalism in academia; some had violent upbringings. All rejected God to become atheists.

Marxism is a disease of prosperity, greatly afflicting the children of privilege, an elitist orthodoxy based on the childish idea of revolt and rebellion against family norms. Poor little rich kids, presuming that their personal “trials” validate their “struggles” as being equal to the “oppressed” use their societal positions to construct an ideology designed to control others that they deem incapable of making decisions for themselves.

It seems all too self-righteous and self-aggrandizing, bordering on narcissism. There also seems an irrational need for retribution. Stalin killed 10 million Ukrainians through government induced famine; Mao’s “Great Leap” killed 45 million. Three million died in Pol Pot’s killing fields. The glorious revolution of global Marxism is estimated to be responsible for between 100 million and 150 million deaths.

Compare these murderers and terrorists, all revered by the left, to great Americans such as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and John Adams. While the “great” Marxists all conspired to overthrow the governments of their counties and eventually initiated violent revolution under the guise of freeing “the people,” they only established oppressive totalitarian regimes to retain power.

The colonists never wanted war. They petitioned the British Monarchy for redress for years before deciding to declare independence, only choosing to fight when their homes and liberty were at stake. And afterward? They truly released the governance of the country to the people – something none of the “great” Marxists ever did.

Where the founders of America trusted and turned to God, the “great” Marxists turned away.
And yet we are supposed to believe that the American Republic is repressive and evil and we should forget our founding principles and adopt the irrational ideas of mentally unbalanced leftist criminals, thugs and charlatans.